9.2 million people signed up for Obamacare on HealthCare.gov in the past three months
Around 9.2 million people signed up for health care plans in the federal marketplace from November through January in the latest open enrollment period, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which released the numbers for HealthCare.gov on Friday afternoon.
Many more signed up through the marketplaces of individual states, like California. Washington, another state with its own marketplace, saw 225,000 signups—up 13% from last year and its biggest year on record.
Compared to last year’s sign-up period, the numbers were relatively similar. In the open enrollment period in 2016, 9.6 million people signed up – slightly higher. According to the former Chief Marketing Officer for HealthCare.gov, the discrepancy likely comes from the Trump administration pulling ad spots for the signup platform.
“There should be no doubt that Trump’s efforts to sabotage enrollment in the final days before the deadline were at least somewhat successful,” former CMO Joshua Peck wrote on Medium. “I estimated just how many people didn’t get covered because of these efforts — it’s at least half a million.”
While in mid-January the numbers were pacing ahead of 2016, in the end, the numbers were down 424,177. Still, the CMS reported that over 3 million of these signups were first-timers who had not had insurance before.
In response to a query to the Department of Health and Human Services, Vice President Mike Pence’s Deputy Chief of Staff and HHS spokesperson Matt Lloyd told Yahoo Finance that “Obamacare has failed the American people, with one broken promise after another,” and pointed to premium hikes and fewer insurers.
The states with the most HealthCare.gov signups all carried Donald Trump in the 2016 election: Florida (1,760,025 signups), Texas (1,227,290 signups), North Carolina (549,158 signups), Georgia (493,880 signups), and Pennsylvania (426,059 signups).
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.
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